Vanderbilt University's head football coach is in hot water for telling a radio host that when he looks to hire assistants, he first looks at their wives, you know, to make sure they're "Division 1 material." I had an inkling that Vandy's decision to hire the pervy kid brother from a John Hughes movie would backfire.

Advertisement

James Franklin's been at the helm at Vanderbilt for a year, and, according to CBS Sports, he's spent much of the year acting like a meathead on blow — flying around in helicopters, doing that fake aggressive death stare thing that high school bullies do, but doing it to another football coach instead of a romantic rival.

His antics crossed from Meathead to Douchebag this week, when he told a radio DJ that before he hires coaching assistants, he doesn't care about dumb shit like qualifications and writing skills; he looks instead to the quality wife the applicant has been able to bag. Franklin mansplained,

Advertisement

I've been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I've seen his wife. If she looks the part, and she's a D-1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That's part of the deal. There's a very strong correlation between having the confidence, going up and talking to a women, and being quick on your feet and having some personality and confidence and being fun and articulate, than it is walking into a high school and recruiting a kid and selling him.

Yeah, it sure takes a special sort of savant to nab a woman who knows how to use the elliptical and a mascara wand.

CBS's Matt Hinton notes that this ethos isn't even something that Franklin came up with on his own — it was detailed in Michael Lewis's Moneyball, and in the book, the "only hire guys with hot wives" rule was actually debunked. So, not only did Franklin try to gank Lewis and act like he was the genius who came up with it, the example he ganked was an example of how not to run a team. Most smartest.

Hey, if James Franklin wants to continue to hiring assistants based on whether or not their wives are hot, he's welcome to; it's a free country and without sexist douchebaggery, I'd be out of a job. But if I were a Vanderbilt fan, I'd be more than a little bothered by Franklin's coaching philosophy — the "D-1 wife" principle only managed to net Vanderbilt football a 6-7 record last season. If Vanderbilt football were a wife, it would only be a homely 5 on the 10 scale. Unacceptable.